86
MARY McCARTHY
could have been followed. Miss Arendt's other famous sentence, that
without the cooperation of the Jewish Councils four and a half to six
million Jews would not have perished, seems to me almost self-evidently
true. Had the Nazis been obliged to use their own manpower to select
Jews for the extermination camps, number them, assemble them, ticket
their property, and so on, they would not only have rounded up fewer
Jews, but they would have felt the drain in their military effort; had
Hitler persisted in the Final Solution, at the cost of diverting troops to
carry it out, the war might have ended somewhat sooner. It is clear that
refusal to cooperate would have met with terrible reprisals, but these
reprisals in turn might have demoralized the army and the civilian
population both in Germany and in the occupied countries, and chaos,
the nightmare of generals, might have been the result. The Final Solution
was preferred by the Nazis to mass massacres by shooting because it
could be carried out smoothly and efficiently-almost peacefully. And
this allowed not only the Germans and the people of occupied countries
but the Jews themselves for a long time to remain ignorant of the true
destination of the cattle cars moving east, on schedule. To say this is not
-horrible charge-to "desire to maximize the role of Jewish leaders in
the destruction of European Jewry." Nor is it to show a lack of sympathy
for their plight. To speculate on the past, as Abel ought to know,
is
not to blame (it is too late for that), but merely to wish, to regret,
to close your eyes and see it done differently, in some cases to admire.
Smoothly and efficiently-almost peacefully. This was the fearful
characteristic of the Final Solution, and for this Eichmann, the trans–
portation expert, was the perfect instrument. Of course six psychiatrists
pronounced him normal; he
was
normal and average and therefore
perfectly fitted for his job, which was to "make the wheels run smoothly,"
in both a literal and a figurative sense. His function was to normalize
the Final Solution. With his conceit and boasting, his pompous home–
made cliches and "winged words," he was at once ridiculous and
ordinary, for ordinariness carried to a zenith is absurd. No better
example of the mass murderer who is at the same time a perfect family
man (Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux) could be found than the ineffable
Eichmann. One of his lawyers said he was like a mailman-a person
you see every day on his methodical rounds and seldom notice. Naturally
he got along well with Jews ; it was part of his job to do so. Among
the cliches he incorporated in his personality (to speak of his "character"
would be a mistake) was the Some-of-my-best-friends cliche. That he
could push this to the point of imagining that he had been converted to
Zionism (the Jewish Final Solution) was pushing the logic of the cliche
